Serious. It's a hard lesson I'm learning really late in life.

This is going to be a rambled, disorganized, free train of thought post. And I expect most to just tune it out.

I come from a very poor background. Family made less than 9k a year. Only reason I made it out alive, was due to the graciousness of some very close friends (fed me on the weekends, filled me in on 'obvious' middle class advice, etc).

Fast forward from childhood to first job, a big4 role. Over the years, I've noticed most come from a privileged middle class background, and have always lived their lives within a narrow comfort range, where they never had to worry about meeting their survival needs. As a result, they had no use for very close friends.

After getting laid off, I decided to take extended time off from work, and in that time, the rich social network of 'friends' I had, rapidly dropped off. Just because I was no longer to keep up with their lifestyle habits, they didn't even try to keep in touch.

Privileged people have fragile Disney like narratives. If you don't fit that narrative, no matter how generous you were to them in the past, no matter how many rich life experiences you shared with them, you're deleted.

To give you an idea of what I consider meaningful vs shallow relationships, let's take a look at birthday gifts.

A shallow, typical yuppie: Will get something out of obligation day or two beforehand. Nothing meaningful. Perhaps a game, article of clothing, gift card, etc. Maybe a store bought birthday card they pass around to get signed.

Real friendship, how I treat my closest friends: I do not gift at all on some schedule set by society. No birthday, christmas, etc. Instead, on my day to day life, if I see something that I believe will be of utility or delight, I pick it up and gift it.

For cards, if there's a significant milestone to celebrate, I make my own. Takes me 5-10 hours to make one.

Here's a meaningful gift I gave to my closest friend: I have a very frugal friend (let's call him Nick) who had a crappy dell computer since college (pentium with regular non-SSD hard drive, running glorious Vista on turtle RAM). It would bluescreen often, and frustrated him to no end. But, he was too disciplined and frugal just replace it. Even after getting a decent paying tech job, he didn't get replace it.

So, I set out to gift him what I thought would be the best setup for his situation. I spent months researching parts and learning about building a desktop. This is before pcpartpicker. Also, Nick, so I wanted a portable desktop. Again, this is before all those nice SFF cases. It took a while, but I compiled a list of parts that would theoretically mesh well together.

Since we lived in different states, I found a mutual friend that was close to Nick, who was willing to receive the parts, build it, and stress cycle it over a week to make sure it was a reliable system.

After the system was good to go, they took Nick out to dinner, and one of them stayed behind, swapping out the computers.

When Nick got back home, he was stunned. And he just knew, without a doubt, who was behind all this. No, I never gave the subtlest hint I was planning this for close to a year now. He just knew, there was only one friend this thoughtful and caring to do something like this.

Those of you that are cynical might think that I value close friends like this, because I'm a desperate unpopular loner virgin. Yes, like any geek, I used to be. But no, that's not the reason. I am very charismatic when I want to be, and have no trouble with girls (no tindr, I'm old fashioned, I go out and approach girls in real life). For instance, when I first moved here to start work, I put effort into being social. Within half a year, I easily had 50-60 'friends', in 6 completely different social groups (quiet nerd group, restaurant burger snob tech group, meetup, yelp, hobby, ex-dates, etc). I also got decent with girls, 4 of them being ridiculously out of my league (and no, not friend zoned. f-close like a beast every time).

Don't know how to wrap this up. I've been through lots and lots of yuppie tech friends, and without a single exception, they have all had very superficial friendship models. People that just hang out because they have nothing better to do than console games, board games, bar crawling, or checking their phones/laptop for work stuff.